Winning, Losing and Uncle Toms.

It should come as no surprise that Jalen Rose was capable of getting under the skin of longtime rival Grant Hill, especially after he admitted in ESPN’s highly-rated “Fab 5″ documentary that he was “a student of trash talk.”

No, the surprise is that the 38-year-old Hill fell for the bait set out [...]

Way Down In the Hole.

In a dozen states, felons leave prison saddled with thousands of dollars in debt from child-support payments that continued to accrue while they were behind bars, and that they’ll likely never be able to pay. [...]

Leftovers.

Most people know Jasper, TX, as the town where a black man named James Byrd was tied to a pickup truck and dragged to his death by three white men in 1998. The photography of Alonzo Jordan, who was something of a local institution,  captures the quieter, happier moments [...]

Money x Money = Problems x Problems

Flickr / Garrett Crawford

A recent (well, maybe not in internet years) episode of Planet Money returned to Haiti, where they’ve been doing a lot of reporting on the economics of the country post-earthquake and investigating how much NGOs are hurting or helping the recovery there.

In a previous podcast, they had visited [...]

A Culture of Poverty, Ctd.

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via Leigh Graham at Change.org

The New York Times ran a story a few days back on the resurgence of academic consideration of culture in discussions of poverty. In short: arguments about cultural explanations of poverty became taboo over the last few decades because many of them were seen as [...]

Should We Avoid Race When Discussing Education Reform?

via Editor B; CC 2.0.

Over on her blog, Dana Goldstein makes the important point that in so many discussions about education reform — a topic that seems to be inescapable right now — the issue of race is avoided.

It’s important to note that the major problem with American [...]

Ross Douthat Should Have Read the Study.

[cross-posted from TAPPED]

Ross Douthat spent his precious column real estate Monday on the plight of poor, white Christians from red states who suffer disproportionately, he says, from elite-college admissions policies that favor lower-income black and Hispanic students over them. He borrows liberally from a blog post by Russell K. Nieli on Minding [...]

Doubling Down.

A lot of jokes have been crafted over the last week or so with KFC’s vaguely evil chicken-cheese-bacon-chicken sandwich as the punchline, but one of the things that’s so surprising about the reaction to it is that, nutritionally speaking, there really isn’t anything about it that is especially outrageous as far as fast [...]